Welcome New Readers!

A recent post of mine got picked up by Scott Alexander in a link roundup. I was astonished to see the amount of traffic that came to my blog via that one link. I shudder to think what an entire Slate Star Codex post dedicated to the the topic might have done. I rarely get comments, but I got a few on the post. And I could tell that people were skimming my older posts, and even commenting on a few. Lurkers are of course perfectly welcome, but I appreciate any feedback I can get. I want to welcome new readers I've picked up in the past week or so.

I'm sure curious readers have perused my previous posts. If you're reading this on a computer or tablet, you should see my most-read posts on the right-hand side. I have a large number of posts arguing against drug prohibition starting around February 2016. I have a couple of posts about what thoughtful comments do and don't look like, here and here. I have a few scattered posts about so-called "inequality", how health insurance should work, and "moral outrage" as a debating tactic (one that I am finding increasingly obnoxious).

A few things I noticed.

Most people don't read all that carefully. That post, which attempts to debunk the standard narrative of the opioid epidemic, had at least a dozen links to prior posts by me which contained supporting information. Fewer than 10% of readers clicked on any of those. I'd hope that a larger share of readers would think, "Huh, is that really true? Why does he think that's true? Oh, there's a link arguing that this is true." Of course, many of those links were to places other than by own blog, and maybe people were scrupulously checking the various government documents and other articles I linked to. I promise that I'm doing my best and will never deliberately bend the truth, but I also sincerely hope nobody ever simply takes my word for anything I claim on this blog.

Some of the comments I got were great. And some were terrible. I made a couple of edits on my post after reading those comments (some here and some at SSC). One was to correct an error (one that I thought was not material, even to the very narrow argument in that particular paragraph). One was to clarify something that was not an error. (I called meditation "basically a placebo treatment", which should not be construed to mean I think meditation isn't effective for pain management. Just that I have an expansive definition of "placebo." After all, imagine doing an experiment where one group gets "real" meditation and the other gets "placebo" meditation as the treatment...) One thing I didn't care for was how easily people will conclude that you're deliberately lying. One comment, if I'm reading it correctly, implied that I was "lying about" a statistic cited in the Vox paper. Another implied that one of my claims was "dishonest." Is this how the rationalist community points out mistakes, and even disagreements that can't really be called "mistakes"? Mostly not, but it was a little bit grating to get this treatment over immaterial details. To say that somebody is "lying" implies something about their motives, which usually the accuser doesn't know. Anyway, the good comments outweighed the bad ones, and even the bad ones forced me to think harder about my arguments. (Bad commenters sometimes improve your understanding in the same way as a small child who keeps asking "Why?" to each successive answer.)

There were some excellent comments at Slate Star Codex about how people are actually using opioids. Consider it a small, random sample, but it's still illuminating. Considering the examples given (a broken arm, skin scraped to the bone, oral surgery), I'm very glad these people got powerful painkillers. I really hope that Vox does not have the effect on health policy that it wants to have, which would probably deny a few of these acute pain sufferers the relief they seek.